On October 10, 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court heard opening arguments in the controversial Fisher v. University of Texas affirmative action case in which Abigail Fisher, a white 2008 Texas public school graduate, charges that she was a victim of racial discrimination. Fisher narrowly missed out on admission to the state’s flagship institution under Texas’s Top 10% Law that guarantees admission to any Texas high school student ranked in the top 10% of her or his class. This race-neutral law accounts for 60-80% of each year’s matriculating students. The rest of the class is selected through a combination of academic factors and a “Personal Achievement Index” that takes into account a variety of factors including race. The University has argued for the importance of its affirmative action policy to ensure diversity—specifically; a greater number of more affluent minorities than were being admitted under the Top 10% Law. Given the roots of affirmative action policy in the principle of justice, the fact that the arguments for fairness came from the anti-affirmative action side presents an irony of particular relevance to the field of moral development.

As a former university affirmative action officer whose dissertation research examined college faculty’s moral reasoning about affirmative action, I have been following this case with great interest. While fully acknowledging the barriers still posed by racial discrimination, I believe that a policy designed to achieve diversity by admitting more affluent and better-educated minority students over less affluent and privileged white ones will ultimately prove impossible to defend.

However, if you had asked me 20 years ago what I thought about the fairness of affirmative action I would have said that there was absolutely no question about its justice. Given our country’s long history of discrimination, not to mention the findings of social psychology about aversive and latent racism, it seemed reasonable and fair to increase the number of under-represented women and minorities in institutions and businesses by careful workforce analyses, reasonable and flexible goals and timetables, aggressive outreach efforts, and preferential treatment to women and minority candidates whose credentials were relatively equivalent to those of majority candidates.

Today I would offer a different response. In 1961 we may have needed a tool such as President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 to combat racial discrimination. However in 2012, I find myself agreeing with literary theorist and author Walter Benn Michaels whose book, The Trouble with Diversity: How we Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, argues that a focus on ethnicity masks the differences that really matter in our society—genuine discrepancies of class and wealth.

In writing this piece, I went back to my 1994 doctoral research to re-examine my findings in light of our field’s current acknowledgement of the complex interplay between moral reasoning and moral intuitions. Working with mentor Ann Higgins, I had surveyed college faculty about hypothetical affirmative action hiring dilemmas in which we varied the race of the minority candidate between African American and Asian (the so called “model minority”). We also examined differences in support for hiring a minority candidate presented as “relatively equivalent” (fully meeting merit criteria but perhaps not exactly equivalent in amount of scholarship or teaching experience) versus one described as having excellent potential but significantly less experience than the majority candidate.

Findings suggested that decisions to hire minority candidates were more strongly related to the rater’s use of principled (more complex) moral reasoning than to the candidate’s race.  However, relevant to the current Fisher case, we also found that decisions to hire minority candidates were much more likely when the moral dilemmas concerned relative equivalency rather than the sort of potential implicit in the University of Texas’s Personal Achievement Index.

Today, I would suspect that the moral reasoning complexity of our participants might have had less influence on their decisions about hiring dilemmas than did their intuitive response to the fairness of the scenarios.  For most respondents, if two candidates were relatively equivalent and there was a policy in place to ensure that universities became more diverse, then justice was well served. However, no matter the candidate’s race or the rater’s preference for principled reasoning, not hiring a more experienced candidate just because he was the wrong race may have tapped an intuitive sense of a violation of fairness.

And it is this intuitive reaction to the University of Texas’s use of affirmative action that highlights the flaws in using a tool for achieving racial diversity in isolation from economic factors. Simply admitting graduates in the top 10% of their graduating class from all Texas high schools not only brought in significant numbers of Black and Latino students, but also working class Whites and Asians from less competitive high schools.  Where once I would have given great weight to the moral reasoning underlying people’s competing conceptions of the justice of affirmative action, today I am more sensitive to the power of Americans’ gut reactions to the policy.  If our focus on diversity has indeed distracted us from addressing the deep injustice of socioeconomic inequality, then perhaps the time has come for serious consideration of new solutions and policies.

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Elizabeth Vozzola is Professor of Psychology and Director of Honors at the University of Saint Joseph, West Hartford, CT.

Juveniles are developmentally different than adults.  As a society we get it, right?  In the 1930s child labor laws were established when the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, recognizing that juveniles are fundamentally different than working adults.  They are in a state of developmental maturation which requires special safeguards because of their immaturity.   In the United States juveniles are not allowed to vote until their 18th birthday and are not allowed to consume alcohol until their 21st birthday.  Why?  Because juveniles are in state of developmental maturation.  They are not ready to be held fully accountable for the ramifications of their actions or inactions in the same way that adults are.  In recent years the United States Supreme Court has taken this metaphorical football and has run with it.  In 2005 (Roper v. Simmons) and 2010 (Graham v. Florida), the Court passed laws rejecting the death penalty for juveniles, and life without the possibility of parole for juveniles who commit non-homicide offenses.  The Court did it again in 2012 (Miller v. Alabama) when they rejected mandatory life without parole for juvenile homicide offenders. Why?  Because the Court recognized that juveniles are in a state of developmental maturation.  In all three cases the Court relied upon scientific evidence regarding the development of children’s brains.  Neuropsychological research has shown persuasive evidence that the juvenile brain differs substantially from the adult brain in several key ways, and as a result the Court reasoned that juveniles should be held to a different standard than adults.  The scientific evidence considered by the Court was summarized in three amicus briefs filed by the American Psychological Association which can be viewed here: (Roper v. Simmons amicus brief; Graham v. Florida amicus brief; Miller v. Alabama amicus brief).

So as a society in the 21st century we finally seem to “get it.”  Juvenile brains operate differently than adult brains, and as such they cannot be expected to perform the same cognitive tasks with the same degree of reliability than their adult counterparts.  So why then have so many professional educators in our elementary schools missed out on receiving this news flash? This lack of understanding recently played out  in an Arizona charter school where a 5th grade student was docked half of all total possible points on a major class assignment (tantamount to receiving a grade of “F”) for simply forgetting to put his name on the paper.  To metaphorically rub a little salt in the wound and squirt some lemon juice in the eye, this was the first time this student made such an error on submitted school work.  Was this omission a developmentally expected occurrence for a 5th grader?  You bet.  Not to mention forgetting to take out the trash, forgetting to turn off the lights when leaving a room, or forgetting not to talk with one’s mouths filled with food.  These are all things one would expect a 5^th grader to occasionally drop the ball on.  Would you “hammer’ a child for making such a developmentally appropriate mistake?  Probably not if you know anything about child development, positive reinforcement strategies or techniques for motivating children towards success.   An inquiry posted to an APA (American Psychological Association) listserv asking for feedback regarding the teacher’s grading strategy produced a flurry of replies. Academics and clinicians from Harvard to Berkeley (and many places in between) sounded off in a unanimous chorus that the teacher’s response was inept and inappropriate.  What was most interesting, however, was the listserv feedback indicated that the teacher’s response was not an isolated incident.  Similar occurrences were reported from around the country regarding other examples of harsh and unfair grading practices that severely punished students for simple, developmentally appropriate oversights having nothing to do with their academics.  One example reported a middle school teacher from Kentucky who was known to keep a paper shredder by his desk and routinely shred in front of the class any student assignment turned in without a name on it.  Aside from bad teaching practice, this is a moral and ethical issue at its core because it involves an excessively harsh response to behavior that is at least partially determined by developmental factors.  Moreover, what ethic does it teach the child? Not unlike the court cases cited above, we as a society find ourselves in “ethical quicksand” if we allow ourselves to dole out excessively punitive sanctions for behavioral errors or omissions that are tied to development.  The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed this not once but three times within the past decade.  Why then does it seem that so many professional educators are so far behind the learning curve on this one?  Better yet, what can psychologists and moral educators do to nurture much needed enlightenment and understanding in this critical area?  In-service trainings on positive behavior modification strategies is one possible solution that could help classroom teachers develop a more effective and positively oriented set of tools for use in their classrooms.  Compulsory behavior modification training is also something that could be required in all university based teacher training programs.  Lastly, one would expect the landscape might begin to shift simply by providing “education to the educators” that it does indeed represent a moral, ethical and pedagogical failure to harshly punish children for errors and omissions that are rooted in their development.

Just as the U.S. Supreme Court ran with its metaphorical football on this issue over the past decade, now it is our turn to take the ball and run with it….

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D. Scott Herrmann, Ph.D., ABPP,  is a licensed psychologist and board certified diplomate in clinical child / adolescent psychology and police / public safety psychology.  He is co-founder of Arizona Child Psychology, PLLC in Phoenix, Arizona, PSU director of the Superior Court of Arizona, and an adjunct professor of psychology at Northern Arizona University.

As I write this, the 2012 Summer Olympics are just getting underway.  It’s a pleasant break from the other epic contest that’s been dominating our TV sets for the past several weeks – the ad battles between the U.S. presidential candidates!  It certainly is an opportune moment to reflect on that virtually omnipresent process that engulfs so much of our lives – competition.  We rely on competition as a central dynamic in our businesses, our politics, our legal system, our schools, and our games.

I’ve been struck recently by the frequency with which competition is mentioned in a variety of educational texts, usually in a quick, casual manner and almost always with an implied negative connotation.  For example, I was reviewing the introductory text that we use in our Educational Foundations course and noticed that it mentions how teachers sometime become “competitive” with other teachers, to their detriment.  Social and educational critics often mention how the “hidden curriculum” of schools teach students to value competition, apparently at the expense of cooperation.  Of course, the most explicit and detailed criticism of competition is presented by Alfie Kohn in his APA-Award-winning book, No Contest: The Case against Competition (1992).

I am far from unsympathetic to the views expressed by many of the critics of competition.  Put people in contests and you are likely to find an escalation of prejudices.  Pit groups against each other, and you are likely to create or augment hostilities.  Economists may tell us that competition creates lean and innovative companies.  Perhaps.  But it can just as easily promote deception and cheating, false advertising, compromised safety standards, and the like.  On balance, does competition lead to better politics, better businesses, and better education?  Does it promote a more ethical society, a more moral citizenry?

In this brief op-ed, I would like to suggest that debates about the value and utility of competition invariably miss the mark because they are based on a muddy view of competition.  First, let me acknowledge that many writers try to distinguish productive from unproductive forms of competition.  They do so by labeling competition that leads to negative outcomes with such terminology as hyper-competition, destructive competition, zealous competition, and so on.  The problem is that these terms are either tautologies (competition is bad when it is bad competition) or seem to suggest that competition becomes problematic simply when it becomes too competitive.

What we need is a way to distinguish qualitatively between different forms of contesting, of which competition is only one.  I believe that much of our confusion around competition relates to the fact that we use the term to designate two quite different, quite distinct processes.  Both processes are modes of contesting.  If we are to advance in our thinking about competition, we need to make some linguistic and conceptual distinctions that are often not made.

My launching point is this:  contests are not self-interpreting.  Their meaning and significance is not given by the contest structure itself.  Rather, the meaningfulness of a contest is determined by how people think about it.  Drawing from the cognitive-linguistic tradition of research that dates back to the pioneering work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (e.g., Metaphors We Live By), I believe that the abstract notion of “contest,” like other abstract ideas and concepts, is invariably filtered through metaphorical interpretation.  In other words, people use conceptual metaphors to “make sense” out of contesting.

There are two basic conceptual metaphors that are available to make sense of contests.  First, contests can be interpreted through a “contest-is-war” metaphor.  While the conceptual metaphor is often embraced unconsciously, the contest-is-war metaphor underlies many common ways of talking about contests.  For example, in reference to two sport teams, commentators may say:

This is an offensive shootout.
They dodged a bullet.
There was great blocking at the point of attack.
Team X has a lot of weapons.
Team Y is still very much alive.

Expressions such as these make immediate sense to listeners because we are all familiar with the contest-is-war metaphor even if we haven’t explicitly reflected on it.

The second conceptual metaphor available to interpret contests is the “contest-is-partnership” metaphor.  While not as culturally dominant as the contest-is-war metaphor, we can easily make sense of expressions such as these:

The teams brought out the best in each other.
Ali needed Frazier before his true greatness could be realized.
They turned defeat into victory.
Success cannot be measured by the scoreboard.
They all had a good time.

Expressions such as these draw from an underlying metaphor that points to the mutual benefit that can come from contesting.  Contests are a kind of partnership in which the dynamic opposition and tension that indwell the process of trying to outperform opponents serves as a catalyst, a stimulant, for bringing out one’s best.  Viewed through the contest-is-partnership metaphor, contests provide a context for an enjoyable striving for excellence.

Interestingly, the etymology of the word competition (from the Latin, com-petere, meaning “to strive” or “to seek” with) aligns with the contest-as-partnership metaphor.  Competition is a striving with opponents; it is seeking with them.  What is being sought?  Competition is a mutual seeking of excellence through striving to meet or exceed the challenge provided by the opponent.  Competition, when true to its etymology, is designed to serve excellence.

In sports, competition is designed to bring out physical excellence and the exhilaration, excitement and joy that come from pushing one’s boundaries toward peak performance.

In economics, competition is designed to serve excellence in production and distribution through maximizing innovation, reducing waste, and streamlining processes.

In politics, competition is designed to promote excellence in public service by bringing out the best policies and holding officials accountable to the ballot box.

Of course, contests often fail to achieve these lofty goals.  In fact, they probably fail more often than they succeed.  The quest for excellence in a sport contest can degenerate into an egoistic battle for claims to dominance or superiority.  The contesting for market share by companies can devolve into misleading advertising, shoddy after-sale support, compromised safety standards, market manipulations, and so on.  Politicians, rather than debating the merits of genuinely-held beliefs and policy-commitments, can contest through misrepresentations of opponents and other “dirty tricks” of campaigning.

One problem is that we do not have a word in English to name the process of contesting when it is animated by the contest-is-war metaphor.  So let’s invent one:  decompetition.  The prefix “de-” simply means “reverse of” or “opposite of.”  If genuine competition involves striving with opponents for excellence, decompetition is striving against them in a battle for dominance or extrinsic rewards.

Decompetition is not just too much competition.  It is not “hyper-competition” or any of the other labels that imply too much of a good thing.  It is qualitatively different.  It is its own distinct process with a different set of goals and motivations from those that characterize genuine competition.  Elsewhere, my colleagues and I have elaborated on the numerous distinguishing characteristics between true competition and decompetition, but they all arise from the conceptual metaphor that gives a sense of structure, meaning, direction, and purpose to the contest.  Depending on whether you see the contest as fundamentally a partnership or a war will change how you conceptualize your relationship with opponents, how you relate to the officials, where you find the primary sense of value, the strategies you will adopt, the types of emotions likely to be elicited, how you conceptualize the “ideal” contest, and so on.

To avoid a common misunderstanding, let me emphasize that the conceptual metaphors that underlie competition and decompetition are not necessarily paralleled in overt language.  A person who thinks through the contest-as-war metaphor may never talk directly about “battling” opponents.  Perhaps more oddly, a person who thinks through the “contest-as-partnership” metaphor may, in fact, use the language of battle or war; but it is a language of play; of gest.  They can still be animated by the partnership understanding.  What is critical is not the language used, but the way of conceptualizing the fundamental relationship that is at work in contests.

Most social science research on “competition” has found that it has negative outcomes, such as reduced learning, lower productivity, increased hostility, and so on.  But the research is limited by the fact that it has failed to distinguish competition from decompetition.  Similarly, the vocabulary of competition and decompetition is necessary if we are to identify when – under what specific circumstances – contests can be productive and helpful and when they are going to degenerate and become counterproductive.

Of course, at root, the distinction between competition and decompetition is not purely descriptive.  It is moral.  The metaphors that animate competition and decompetition reflect different approaches to human relationships.  Are we, fundamentally, thrown into existence, pitted against one another in a cut-throat battle for recognition and supremacy?  Must my gain imply your loss?  Those are views associated with the contest-is-war metaphor.  In contrast, the contest-as-partnership metaphor reflects a deep appreciation of human interdependency.  It reflects a moral belief that even when we are pitted against each other, there is common ground; mutual benefits can be obtained.  It reflects a profound and abiding respect for “the other” – the opponent.  Genuine competition, far from being the opposite of cooperation, is built on a belief that we are all united in a desire for growth, improvement, competence, and mastery, and that we need one another to be our best.

For more elaborated descriptions of this view, see:

Shields, D., & Bredemeier, B.  (2009).  True competition: A guide to pursuing excellence in sport and society. Champaign, IL:  Human Kinetics.

Shields, D., & Bredemeier, B.  (2011).  Contest, competition, and metaphor.  Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, 38, 27-38.

Shields, D., & Bredemeier, B.  (2011).  Why sportsmanship programs fail, and what we can do about it.  JOPERD:  Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance, 82(7), 24-29.

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David Light Shields is Professor of Educational Psychology at St. Louis Community College – Meramec.

I was taught as a boy that vision involves an image entering my head through my eyes. As the image is conducted through the lenses, it is flipped upside down and projected stereoscopically onto the back of my head. My brain then has to re-flip the image and interpret it. Putting the matter this way, however, assumes the presence of a little man inside my head who sees the image projected as if onto a screen – who would in turn have to have a little man inside his head, and so on ad infinitum.

This is called the “homunculus [or ‘little man’] fallacy.” Neuroscientists scoff at such a lack of sophistication.

On the other hand, we sometimes hear neuroscientists say things like the following: “Just as the CEO of a corporation delegates different tasks to different people occupying different offices, your brain parcels out different jobs to different regions” (V.S. Ramachandran, 2011, The Tell-Tale Brain, p. 95). This brain-as-bureaucracy metaphor is not far from a little person watching the screen at the back of your head, or an entire bureau of such little people, with a master homunculus as CEO.

With the homunculus fallacy in mind, please answer Question #1:

Which is more correct?

1. Your eyes are reading this sentence. (Also, your anterior insula and/or limbic system may be feeling wary of a trick at this point in the blog post.)
2. Your brain is reading this sentence, using input from your eyes. (Perhaps your brain is sounding an alarm: “danger Will Robinson!”)
3. You are reading this sentence, through activity of your eyes and several visual, motor, and language processing pathways in your brain. (You were right to be suspicious, through processing in your brain’s anterior insula and/or limbic system. The question is loaded.)

Worried that we might look like pre-scientific animists if we explicitly attribute “will” to persons, we over-compensate and shift the real action down a level or two. To avoid implying there is a god in the mechanism, we assign organism functions to a physical organ or organ sub-system (eyes & visual cortex, anterior insula & limbic system, etc.). But this way of talking implies there is a little organism in the organ.

We do this in moral psychology when, for instance, we attribute judgments or reasoning to localized brain functions. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex makes moral judgments, or the anterior insula detects norm violations. But brains and their functional units do not judge, reason, feel, or act. The organisms whose brains they are do.

Still, moral psychologists and philosophers don’t need to be wary of all neuroscientific inquiries into moral and ethical functioning. Three disciplines contribute to our knowledge of the way underlying processes in the brain mediate overall person functioning, for instance, in visual processing (which we understand pretty well) or in moral functioning (which we’re only beginning to work out). The three disciplines are neurology (correlating brain lesions with loss of mental function), neurophysiology (monitoring the activity of specific neurons or neuron clusters under certain mental tasks using electrodes), and brain imaging (using techniques such as EEG and fMRI to monitor which parts of the brain are active during certain mental tasks).

There’s no fallacy in recognizing that an organism can’t perform normal tasks if its organs and organ systems aren’t functioning normally – and then trying to work out what normal functioning involves.

For instance, we typically cooperate only when and to the extent that we trust our fellow cooperators and believe the proceedings will be fair. What are the micro-level processes underlying and mediating macro-level trust and perception of fairness? In her recent book, titled Braintrust: What neuroscience tells us about morality, Pat Churchland (2011) summarizes research linking the oxytocin-vasopressin network with willingness to trust and activation in the anterior insula with the perception of uncooperativeness or unfairness (see pp. 71-81).

In the Trust game, a trustor or investor is given $12 at the beginning of the game (or ¥12 or €12, etc.). She then has an opportunity to donate $0, $4, $8, or $12 to an anonymous trustee, which is tripled before the trustee receives it (e.g., an $8 donation becomes $24). Then the trustee has an opportunity to send money back to the investor to begin another round (e.g., $12 of the $24 received). Each can walk away with their current holdings at any point, but the most lucrative strategy is for the two to act as if each will continue so that total assets increase through succeeding rounds.

Artificial elevation of oxytocin levels through nasal spray (internasal oxytocin) has been found to increase both the frequency with which trustors donate more than $0 and the average amount of money donated, relative to control groups. However, internasal oxytocin has no significant effect on trustee back-donations (presumably because the trustee is responding to the trustor’s indication of trust rather than deciding whether to trust). Also, the perceived unfairness of very small offers (in this and the Ultimatum game) is correlated with elevated activity in the anterior insula, both in trustees when trustor donations are low and in trustors when trustee back-donations are low.

Churchland’s main thesis in Braintrust is that “morality originates in the neurobiology of attachment and bonding, [which] depends on the idea that the oxytocin-vasopressin network in mammals can be modified to allow care to be extended to others beyond one’s litter of juveniles….” (p. 71). But whatever you think about that contention, you need not reject the more basic assumption: macro-level person functioning (judging, reasoning, feeling, acting, etc.) is mediated by specific micro-level neural processes (among others), and normal person functioning requires normal neural processes.

With all this in mind, please answer Question #2:

Which is preferable?

1. Loose talk that suggests that the agency exhibited by complex organisms is actually exhibited by their organs,
2. Rejection of neuroscience in moral psychology for fear of losing moral agency altogether, or
3. Acceptance that moral psychology requires broad-based interdisciplinary inquiry.

We should forego both (1) and (2) and admit that moral and ethical functioning are more complex and multi-layered than hitherto may have been dreamt of in our philosophy.

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Don Collins Reed is Professor of Philosophy at Wittenberg University, Springfield, OH.

The moral dilemma of 1950’s racism is a prominent theme of the 2011 film, “The Help,” adapted from the novel of the same name by Katherine Stockett. The film was nominated for numerous Academy Awards (Octavia Spencer won for Best Supporting Actress) and won several Screen Actor’s Guild Awards – Octavia Spenser (Minny) and Viola Davis (Aibileen) picked up individual awards for acting, as did the entire cast for best ensemble. Though wildly popular with mainstream audiences, both the book and the film versions of “The Help” have been the subject of widespread controversy and debate in academia and in the blogosphere. Most recently Melissa Harris Perry devoted a segment of her show (“The Melissa Harris Perry Show”) to a harsh critique of the film’s inaccurate historical conveyances. It seems that White people love the film as an exploration of bygone inequality in interracial relations between White and Black women and the evils of racism. But given the film is not only about race, but also about women, what about the evils of sexism?

“The Help” works against feminism by playing on stereotypes of women’s problematic relationships with each other.  Because male characters play only minor roles, the film gives a false sense of female dominance, even solidarity.  In this “society of women,” however, race and class play out in accordance to stereotype with a variety of women who judge, hate, and police one another.  The film maintains its theme of female solidarity by depicting racism and sexism more as consequences of individual behaviors and less as a set of social hierarchies generated and enforced through legal mandates and institutional practices.  And each of the main (white) female characters in “The Help” displays questionable moral behavior in her treatment of other women, typified by interpersonal, emotional abuse and violence between women.

The audience is meant to identify with Skeeter (Emma Stone) as she grows into herself – thanks to her childhood maid, Constantine (Cicely Tyson) and later on with “the help” of Minny and Aibileen through the stories they share with her about their lives as maids in Mississippi.  Through these journeys toward self-awareness (or what feminists have called “coming to voice”) Skeeter is made recognizable as a budding feminist interested in social justice through her desire to tell the maids’ stories – something no one has done before.  But in the end, upon publication of her book, her willful pursuit of feminism diminishes, and rather than choosing a feminist morality, she is instead forced into it.  The final scenes of the film depict her boyfriend, Stuart (Chris Lowell) leaving her for “stirring up trouble” and for being “selfish” for pursuing a career after her book (from which the novel and film draw their title) “The Help.”  His parting words:  “I think you’re better off alone.”  What Stuart tells Skeeter about herself is echoed by the maids Aibileen and Minny, that essentially Skeeter has to take the job offer in New York, because no local man will want her, and she has alienated all of her female peers by outing them as racists in her book.  If a feminist morality hinges on solidarity and sisterhood, Skeeter, having found herself, is left with neither, and is free to follow a life that is based on a morality that emphasizes free choice and autonomy over caretaking and solidarity.

Thinking more about sisterhood, given “The Help” is a film about women, we need to ask what does it tell us about women’s relationships with other women?  Black women’s solidarity and capability for friendship is contrasted with White women’s emotional violence with one another, as embodied by the character Hilly’s maltreatment of her own mother, several of the maids, the woman she calls “White-trash,” Celia Foote, and her so-called friends Skeeter and Elizabeth.  The quintessential mean girl, she bullies, castigates, frames, lies, and uses her power to maneuver against other women.  Each negative stereotype about female group dynamics along race/class/generational lines is present in “The Help.”  Black women’s relationships are depicted as “true” friendships, even though that solidarity seems to be depicted as due to the marginal spaces these women occupy, the result of poor social standing, and limited political power.  The type of progressive (Black) womanhood or a solidarity based on positive elements is absent here.  And, frankly, Aibileen places Minny at risk by involving her in the initial interviews with Skeeter.  That is to say, the morality of justice seems to outweigh a morality of caretaking.

In the end stereotypes about women, both Black and White, outweigh honest filmmaking.  In her SAG award acceptance speech on January 29, 2012, Viola Davis (Aibileen) stepped up from her front-row seating to remind viewers that racism and sexism are not just “women’s issues,” but everyone’s problems.  Ironically feminism, which has been effectively challenging these forms of oppression for a very, very long time, was given a seat in the balcony.

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Stephanie Troutman is Assistant Professor of Women & Gender and African-American Studies at Berea College, Berea, KY. 

I am confused about words. I have found the language of moral education to be a semantic minefield. There is no moral GPS to help with such semantic navigation. I have lectured, written, etc. under quite a set of terms. The terminology varies geographically and historically. And there are many overlapping terms used: moral education, values education, character education, civic education, citizenship education, democratic education, moralogy, social-emotional learning, positive psychology, etc. As a doctoral student in developmental psychology, I discovered Kohlbergian moral development. It began a 40-year journey that has had many terminological turning points. For about two decades I walked a straight line under the banner of “moral development and education.” I renounced the “values education” and “values clarification” movements, embracing the Kohlbergian party line that values and virtues were arbitrary and non-universal, a “bag of virtues.” As a devoted member of AME, I almost never missed an annual meeting. I served on the Board of AME for about 15 years, at first informally at the invitation of Kohlberg and eventually more formally through member elections.

Then I began to realize that the field was stagnating, for want of an applied focus. I loved convening with my colleagues (and still do); this was my intellectual family and many of the AME members were my close and long-standing friends (and still are). Then in 1992, I was invited to a meeting in Aspen CO, dubbed a “Youth Values Summit.” At this meeting I discovered that only a couple of months earlier another meeting had occurred in Wisconsin, and the term du jour there was “character.” The Racine meeting was the birth of the Character Education Partnership, which remains the major US character education organization. Both were attempts to start a national movement to support schools that promote values or character development. I realized that these were the “bag of virtues” folks that I and my fellow Kohlbergians had been conceptually denigrating. They were smart and well-intentioned, but did not know much about the psychology of morality in general nor moral reasoning development in particular. However, they really wanted to impact schools and students.

When Bill Gatherer of the Scottish Gordon Cook Foundation attended my AME workshop on moral dilemma discussion methods, he decided that British “values education” needed training in American “moral education.” This led me to dare a major session at the AME conference in New York in 1995, in which the AME and CEP leaders would attempt to find common ground. CEP needed AME’s scholarly base and AME needed CEP’s applied vision. Sadly, it bombed…miserably. There was too large a gap between AME’s scholarly approach and CEP’s atheoretical pragmatic school-based perspective.

So I decided to live in both worlds, and, in accepting my current position, found myself moving from the moral world to the character world, after a brief stop in the values world (Scotland). Some of my colleagues thought that I had experienced a psychiatric breakdown…really. In fact, nothing had changed but the labels. Yet I was repeatedly forced to explain and defend. Reflecting on this, I reached two conclusions about this semantic mess.

First, while there are differences between these fields, in many ways they are like a predominantly overlapping set of Venn diagram circles. The shared space is that all are endeavors to understand, explain, and/or impact the development of pro-social characteristics in children and adolescents. They are fundamentally about socializing each subsequent generation of youth to be contributors to, rather than detractors from, the common good; to nurture justice and caring in the world. In some cases they may focus more on social competencies (e.g., social-emotional learning) or on knowledge of the good (e.g., values and character education) or on socio-moral critical thinking competency (e.g., moral education) or on the knowledge, skills and dispositions of a contributing member of a democratic society (e.g., civic, citizenship or democratic education), but in all cases they are about supporting the positive development of children and adolescents as agents of justice and care.

Conflict between and discomfort with the terms seem inevitable. Science has devolved from a global pursuit of truth to more of a “my theory can beat up your theory” philosophy of science; a kind of scientific imperialism. Certainly individuals and organizations have wedded themselves to specific terms and are reticent to give them up; and so find ways to exaggerate the differences and vilify their conceptual “enemies.”

A deeper reason that the language wars persist and likely will always persist is that this broad field is inherently polarizing. In dealing with morality, ethics, goodness, social justice, and the model of a good person, people of different ideologies will be suspicious of others. This stuff is so important, not just to the world but to our individual identities and psyches, that we balk at the prospect that someone else will meddle with our core commitments and beliefs, and those of our children and communities. So we become paranoid and project our fears onto the terms. And we search for the holy semantic grail; the one word that will unify us all.

It doesn’t exist. It never will exist, because it is not the words that are flawed. Rather it is our discomfort with the domain. So I have decided that I don’t care if you call it character or values or morality or something else. All I care about is that we look to what valid science and philosophy can tell us about how to make a just and caring world by nurturing the positive development of our youth. Call it what you will. Just do it and do it wisely and well. That is the character and value of moral education.

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Marvin W. Berkowitz is the Co-Director of the Center for Character and Citizenship, and the Sanford N. McDonnell Endowed Professor of Character Education, at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

Racial integration has fallen off the table of “education reform” offerings. Yet racial integration is a moral imperative, as Martin Luther King Jr. said. And it is even more of an imperative than when he said it since our society is now so much more diverse than it was in the 1960’s. It’s a paradox. We are more and more diverse overall, yet our neighborhoods and our schools are less and less diverse, and increasingly segregated by wealth and race.

Why is school integration a moral imperative? First, only if people of different races and ethnicities interact with each other as young people can they learn the habits of respectful interaction with those who are different. Only then will they gain empathy from learning about the distinctive experiences of people who are different from them. Only then will they learn to see people who differ from them racially and ethnically as equals and fellow citizens. Only then will they be able to participate knowledgeably in democratic deliberation that seeks a common good. Only if young people routinely encounter and learn from those who are different will they be able to build a harmonious society out of their differences.

Racial integration is also a moral imperative because it is the only road to social justice, especially in education. Separate can never be equal. Only if students of different groups attend the same schools can they consistently receive equal educations. And the classes in those schools must also be integrated. Re-segregation inside desegregated schools won’t do. The research is clear that one of the surest ways to diminish the racial achievement gap is through integration. There can be no equal opportunity in education until we have shrunk this gap, between white students on one side and blacks and Latinos on the other.

If racial integration is so vital, why isn’t it happening? It did happen for a while. From 1968 until 1980, there was a strong push to integrate schools, all over the country and especially in the South. This movement was driven partly be judicial mandate, but also by a widespread recognition, at the school district level, among the general populace, that racial integration was better education and was better for society too. And it shrunk the achievement gap too.

But by the late 1980’s, this progress started to be turned around. Why? For a few reasons. One is that over the past twenty years or so, courts have released school districts from mandates to integrate. The nadir of judicial retreat from integration was the 2007 “Parents Involved” case. There the Supreme Court went even further than previous decisions, and said that districts could not integrate if they achieved the integration by using students’ racial identity to assign them to schools (by making sure that schools did not become too segregated). Since race-sensitive assignment policy has been the main way districts have achieved integration, this decision presented a serious obstacle, although it built on previous court decisions that released our society as a whole from rectifying its legacy of racial injustice and segregation.

Another reason for the retreat from integration is that the field of “education reform” is crowded with all kinds of other initiatives which do not include integration, yet have no proven record of improving education for the most disadvantaged students of color—reforms such as paying teachers for improved test scores of their students, opening more charter schools, closing schools whose students score below some defined standard, weakening teacher protections and unions, and constant reliance on test scores to measure students’ educational progress. The evidence shows that school integration, along with funding preschool education and equalizing funding disparities are much more reliable ways to reducing achievement gaps.

The deeper problem here is the failure in most current reform to foreground the civic purposes of education mentioned above—training a new generation in the virtues of civic engagement and understanding for a diverse society. Education is not only to provide individual students with the tools of social mobility and economic viability. It is also to serve a social good, to realize ideals of social justice, mutual respect across differences, and democracy.

One ray of hope on the horizon is a set of guidelines that the federal Departments of Justice and of Education issued in December of last year. The guidelines instruct school districts in steps they can take to achieve integration in their schools, within the constraints imposed by the judiciary, especially in the Parents Involved decision. For example, a district can use residence in a black neighborhood as a basis for student assignment, even though it cannot use the student’s actual race. The guidelines interpret the Parents Involved decision as allowing for a good deal more integrative efforts than did the Bush administration’s guidelines. The Obama guidelines are a ringing assertion of the civic purposes of integrated education: “Racially diverse schools provide incalculable education and civic benefits by promoting cross-racial understanding, breaking down racial and other stereotypes and eliminating bias and prejudice.”

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Lawrence Blum is the Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Education at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.  He is the author of the forthcoming High School, Race, and America’s Future: What Students Can Teach Us about Morality, Diversity, and Community.

I’ve been honored to serve this year as President of AME and look forward to the next two years.  I’d like to take this Forum opportunity to  tell membership about an idea that will finally come to fruition on our web-site, an Op Ed section.  This section on our web page will be a place for debate, discussion, and comment, a place where AME voices can be heard about important topics.

The idea for an Op Ed page or AME blog began over 10 years ago when I first was on the Executive Board.  Then President Monica Taylor asked me to make a proposal to the board with regard to how AME work could reach a broader audience through the media.  I presented several ideas and concerns were raised with regard to whether  we could ever agree on one AME position, whether we might have a public relations volunteer who matched up members to journalists when news developed that could benefit from a moral ed/moral development perspective, and whether we could state opinions publicly about certain topics given our 501C status.  After that meeting in Glasgow, the idea of media outreach was dropped.

A few years later, the second time I was on the board, I became concerned when I learned that juveniles in the United States who had committed murders were being executed.  Against execution in any form, I was particularly disturbed by this and discovered there was an important Supreme Court case  (Roper v Simmons, 2005) that was going to decide whether it was illegal.  Several organizations were writing briefs to the court that were in effect letters that presented both an opinion and research to support that opinion.  I spoke to a person from an anti-death penalty NGO who was organizing the briefs for the lawyers presenting the case and he said that such a statement from the Association for Moral Education would be very helpful.   So, at that time, I researched with then President Steve Thoma whether or not we could do this as an organization, feeling fairly certain that the vast majority of members would agree that the U.S. should not be executing juveniles.  I believed we had something unique to say about these juveniles and about their moral development post adolescence.  But our tax status precluded such an effort. Instead I collected names via Larry Nucci’s listserv and sent a petition saying that we were all moral development researchers and educators but did not use AME’s name.  The Supreme Court did make the right decision to not execute juveniles.

Now, as President, I have introduced an idea of an Op Ed page.  My dream for this page is not just that AME members can discuss with each other various theoretical disagreements in the field, but that we can write and respond to essays that look outward to important current events, practices in the field, and issues.  I talked to the board about this and board members Larry Blum and Bruce Maxwell  presented  a proposal that was passed last June (we have online meetings and voting). Since then a committee led by Communications Coordinator Eric Marx and including Larry Blum, Don Reed, Elizabeth Vozzola, and Kaye Cook have been “meeting” via emails to develop the process by which these editorials will be solicited, chosen, and vetted.

My vision for this page on our web site is that members write their opinions about important topics (with the disclaimer at the top of the page that the opinion is not an expression of the official position of AME) and that other members and the public have an opportunity to respond.When there is a particularly relevant and important essay, the committee members send the URL to other listservs and blogs they may be reading.  This is one of the ways the smart and important opinions of our members can reach a wider audience, while it is also a way for us to continue throughout the year the great discussions we have at conferences.

Very soon we will have our first op ed piece up and ready for your comments.   We invite you to propose ideas to Eric Marx or me with regard to writing an essay (about 600-800 words) on a topic of wide interest that also has a moral education/philosophy/psychology slant.   Do you want to respond to Diane Ravitch’s article on School Reform in the New York Review of Books?  Do you want to argue against evolutionary views of moral development?   What is wrong with “three strikes and you are out” policies in schools?   In treating kids gone wrong, have we lost sight of the fact that kids develop?  Given the possible effect of sustained playing of violent video games on development, should they be protected as “free speech” (as the Supreme Court recently ruled)?

I’m very excited about this new project and hope you will start thinking of opinions to share that will stir the community to discussion and be a resource for anyone who happens to come across our web site when searching for more information.    Please let me know your thoughts, either by email or over a cup of one of the many wonderful teas we’ll be tasting in Nanjing.  I look forward to seeing many of you there for what looks to be an exceptional conference!

Sharon Lamb,

President, AME